#10: Know Your Enemy

I am sure that what I am about to say will make some people hate me. Probably not the people reading this blog, since they already knew about it and probably take my side in the matter, but if you are stumbling across this while tiptoeing through the internet, be warned: there may be hate a-comin'. Ready?

I am a member of a teacher's union.

Not only a member, in fact, but I'm also a client. (Boom! Sy Sperling reference! Bonus points!) And a representative, and this year, I am even the mouthpiece of a teacher's union in a contract negotiation that will begin in two days. (Because of that I'm not going to get very specific here. You understand, I'm sure. And if not, too bad: I'm still not going to be specific.)

I've been following the kerfuffle in Wisconsin over public employee's unions. I've read two of Glenn Beck's books, in which he blames unions in general for the state of the economy, and teacher's unions in specific for the state of American education, as most conservatives do. I have not yet seen "Waiting For Superman" -- but wait, hang on a sec -- now it's in my Blockbuster Online queue. Though it does have a long wait, so I may have to try to find the one copy at my local rental store. As I understand it, the film describes teacher's unions as largely responsible for the sorry state of education, or at least it blames them for standing in the way of what it suggests as the solution for the problems in education -- bringing in new and exciting young teachers to replace the tired old tenured ones, and allowing students to attend charter schools that follow the same philosophy: find the young rock stars of teaching, the American Education Idols, if you will, and let students come to them. Have I basically got that right?

That's the problem with teacher's unions, right? They have bullied the government into granting teachers ridiculous amounts of pay and benefits, which has destroyed our economy, and they guarantee their members a level of job security that is unheard of and unwarranted, as it helps to protect teachers who shouldn't be teaching -- and why should you work hard when all you have to do to keep your job (and those obscene compensation packages) is show up. That's why conservatives hate unions, and why Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin promised to break them, and why he is determined to carry out that promise despite all the protests, despite all the problems with his argument about the budget.

(If you weren't aware, the budget crisis is not the cause of the governor's stance on the unions in Wisconsin. The budget deficit they face was created when Governor Walker created new tax breaks for the wealthiest people in Wisconsin, tax breaks which are unsustainable with the state's current level of services rendered. In addition, the public employees' unions have stated that they are willing to negotiate and pay a larger share of their benefits and retirement contributions, thus shouldering their part of the budget burden. The burden that was artificially created by the current governor in the first place. So we're not talking about money, here. We're talking about opposition to unions.)

So let me, as a member and active participant in a teacher's union, clear this up, once and for all.

I am not your enemy. Even if you hate me because you do believe the rhetoric from the pundits. And if you do believe the rhetoric, let me really piss you off for a moment: I'm also an atheist, a progressive, a liberal; I have no children, I'm pro-choice, and I oppose guns, the military, and football. Here: feel free to print this out and attach it to your target-shooting silhouette:



That's right: I'm also a middle-aged white male. And I've got long hair. Oh, if only I was gay, too . . .

My teacher's union negotiated with my school district last year. At the time, our district was in a financial hole, and we all knew it. Because of that, the teachers agreed to take only half of our standard raise -- we call it a "step" raise, but you might as well call it a cost of living increase, since that's about what it comes out to (in my case it's about three percent of my salary) -- and at the same time we gave up some of our medical benefits, reducing the plans we had available to us and thus saving the district enough money that the students didn't have to lose school days this past year -- one of the few districts in Oregon that achieved that. We also accepted an increase in our out-of-pocket contributions for those benefits, to go with the increase in co-payments that came with our reduced coverage.

That's right: the students in this district did not lose days from their school year, did not sacrifice part of their education, because the teachers -- those greedy, self-absorbed enemies of the people, according to conservatives -- lost money last year, gave up some of our compensation. We tightened our belts and sacrificed for the good of our district, our clientele, our community. Just as the Wisconsin public servants were willing to do this year.

Let me also note that we have absorbed staff cuts for the past two years, since the bottom fell out of the Oregon state budget (And that after only a few years of surplus when the teachers made some gains -- for many years before that, the Oregon budget was also in the crapper, and the education dollars suffered accordingly.); and yet despite larger class sizes and fewer support staff, our numbers are generally going up -- test scores have gone up, average daily attendance has gone up slightly, discipline problems are down, overall. Our workload has increased, and our compensation has not, and yet we still show results. Oh yes: and of course you noted that despite our guaranteed positions, these cushy tenured jobs that give us no motivation to work hard because we can't be fired -- some of us got fired. Quite a few, actually.

You see, we are public servants. We are realists. We know perfectly well that people are not earning more money, but rather less, in this recession. So we do what we can, and more than we should, to help people, and we accept less money for it. Let's not forget that while we are paid by taxpayers, those we serve directly do not pay us directly, and would in no way be able to afford our services: look at private sector schools and tell me that every single parent could afford to educate their children at private schools, even if the current tax burden was dropped to nothing and all public education closed. Of course they couldn't. We all know it.

Education is a service the government provides, not one that the parents or the students pay for, or earn. And it's a valuable service, too, even if we did nothing but provide twelve years of free daycare for nine months out of the year, which we do. Parents are able to save for college because K-12 education is free; if it weren't, they wouldn't be able to provide their children a higher education, and likely not even a basic education -- and that was the state of affairs prior to the twentieth century when public education became standard across this country.

Public servants are not leeches. We do our jobs, we do them as well as we can, we expect --and deserve -- to be compensated for them. We understand that we cannot earn the compensation we would like; despite that, we do our very best to serve the youth of America (We bitch about it -- I bitch about it more than most -- but note that we keep doing it. I keep doing it. I hate some things about it, but I believe in my job. If I didn't, I would quit. Remember that.), because it is the right thing to do, the best thing for our society, the way in which we can have a positive impact on our world and our people. We are not stealing your money. We are not the enemy.

How about the other claims about union abuses, particularly about teacher's unions: that we defend incompetent workers and prevent the efficient management of government services. Let's trot out the examples, shall we? I watched Diane Sawyer last week; she claimed that we have ALL had that experience, either as a student or as a family member of one, with a teacher who just should not be teaching -- either an incompetent, a burnout, or both. I would question that claim, myself; I don't believe I had that problem. I remember my 8th grade science teacher making us laugh despite the fact that, I found out later, his wife was dying of cancer. I remember my 9th grade history teacher, Ernie White, who retired at the end of my 9th grade year, who was one of the most interesting teachers I had.

I remember slacking off, of course; I remember wasting the efforts of my teachers because of my own teenaged baggage (There's a portmanteau waiting to be born there: maybe teeggage? Bagg-aged? Teabagged? Wait . . .), which I imagine was vastly frustrating for my dedicated and hard-working public school teachers. I remember having teachers with whom I did not get along, but I cannot say that any of my teachers were truly incompetent, so much so that they should have been fired. And that goes all the way back through kindergarten.

Now, I've met teachers since who probably shouldn't be teaching, but most of them are no longer teaching -- they retired or were fired. And the rest of those teachers who shouldn't be teaching? In every instance, one finds after talking to only a few students, that while some kids don't like them, and think they are terrible teachers who should be fired, other kids don't. Some kids love their style, or their methods. Some kids have bonded with those teachers, and are happy learning from them. Not every kid, but then, is there anything on Earth that all teenagers (I am SO tempted to start calling them teabaggers now. But the term is taken. Another reason for me to dislike the Tea Party.) can agree on? Has there ever been?

I had a student in class tell me that one of our math teachers should be fired, because she can't teach. Her evidence? More than half of the class was failing (I question her data, which, like all teenage arguments, was almost certainly anecdotal and assumed.), including her friend, who was otherwise a straight-A student. I pointed out to the young lady that if those were her criteria for firing a teacher, then she just fired me, as well. Because despite my popularity, despite the ease of my class and the amount of effort I put into entertaining my students, and the rapport I build with them, despite the number of students who have told me that I am one of their favorite teachers and even the best teacher they have ever had, somewhere between a third and a half of my students fail my class. Every year.

So should I be fired? Students love me. They fail my class. Some students tell me that they never read an entire book until they got to my class. Some students tell me they never read a book while they were in my class. Sometimes their test scores go up after they have taken my class. Sometimes they don't. I am almost incapable of keeping a class silent and on-task for an entire hour, and yet I have almost no serious discipline problems -- I have never had a student get in my face and yell at me or curse at me, not in eleven years of teaching, not even those students who have been repeatedly punished for defying authority. So am I a good teacher? Should I keep my job? Have I earned what I am paid?

The difficulty with managing education and educators, and the reason we have over the years negotiated, through our unions, for tenure and for automatic raises -- the "step" increases that we get every year -- is that there is no genuinely valid way to determine how well we do our jobs. What criteria do you use? The number of students who pass my class? (Yeah -- base my retention on that. There's a real inducement to make my class genuinely challenging. "Here's your final exam, kids. If you can get Ronald McDonald through the maze to Big Mac Land, you get an A.") The scores they get year by year on standardized tests -- you know, the ones they don't need to graduate and thus don't try very hard on, or the ones they take so many times they get sick of and thus don't try very hard on even when they do need the tests to graduate (because teenagers and good long-term planning go together like oil and water. Or maybe napalm and a match.), or the ones the students fail because that was the day they decided to get stoned at lunch and forgot everything I taught them about poetry, or the ones that have nothing whatsoever to do with what I am teaching or should be teaching because I teach English, not how to read a damn bus schedule -- those tests? Maybe you should base my retention on student opinion polls; if you let the majority rule, then I would have a job for life and my colleague the math teacher would have been gone within a year. Actually, considering how the students really feel about high school, all of us would most likely be gone other than the shop teachers, the music and art teachers, and the PE teachers. Or wait! I know! We'll use administrative evaluations to determine who gets fired and who gets a raise.

Remember that I said I had never had a truly incompetent teacher as a student? And that, since I have been working in public education (and have a far better idea of what makes good teaching and what does not), I have met very few incompetent teachers? Now ask me about administrators. Who are also, people seem to forget, public servants who suckle off the government teat. Who make twice what I do, with the same or better benefits (though not now, as the economy falls headfirst down the stairs, breaking another bone on every step).

In the seven years that I have been teaching in St. Helens, I have seen one English teacher come and go. One other retired, which was a great loss to this school district, but otherwise, there has only been one teacher who came, worked for two years, and then left; and we were glad to see her go because she wasn't a good teacher, in the collective opinion of the English department. Just one.

Know how many administrators have come and gone? Counting superintendents, in seven years there have been seventeen different administrators supervising me. Nineteen if you want to count long term substitute administrators. And of those seventeen administrators, how many were actually competent? How many would I trust to judge fairly as to who was the right teacher to retain and who should be gotten rid of? Well, I do like the administrative team we have now, once they removed the assistant superintendent who couldn't do math (She was in charge of the budget. I wish I was joking.). Of course, our superintendent is retiring this year, and the only candidate they have lined up to replace her has had some large number of complaints and no-confidence votes at his former district, because apparently he doesn't get along well with teachers. I also liked the team that hired me -- though that superintendent and his assistant were let go after one year because they were apparently impossible to work with, screaming and cussing at their office staff and such.

Yeah. Let's have those people decide which teachers should stay and which should go. Do I need to mention that none of my administrators have ever been an English teacher? I think several of them grasp it, having taught subjects similar to English, like science and social studies -- but there have been several administrators who never taught high school, let alone English, and some who never taught at all. How could they possibly know whether or not I do my job well? All they could do is look at -- grades and test scores. And maybe student opinion polls.

Forget about all of that. What it comes down to is this: it is impossible to judge fairly what I teach my students. If a kid reads better at the end of the school year than she did at the beginning, was it something I taught her? Was it something her Spanish teacher, or her social studies teacher taught her? Her parents? Was it simple maturity, that she is better able to focus now? Was it because last year she was in a constant state of turmoil because her boyfriend kept cheating on her, and now she has decided to wait until after graduation to date again? Or the reverse, that now she is dating a boy who values school and actually studies with her when they meet, you know, "at the library?"

I am an educated person, and most people reading this probably are, too. What, specifically, did you learn from any of your teachers that made you educated? What single, identifiable piece of knowledge do I have that makes me educated? Where did I learn to write like this? How did you learn to read it -- and I mean, step by step, what was the exact process that gave you the ability to understand my words? And who, precisely and specifically, was responsible for your retention of those steps, that process, this ability?

Education is not sales; you cannot look at the number of satisfied customers, or the profits I bring in to the company. You cannot even ask my co-workers and subordinates whether or not I am easy to work with (Well, you can ask my co-workers, and the fact that I am easy to work with has something to do with my continued employment), because my co-workers do not see me working day by day by day, because they're not in the classroom with me, and my subordinates -- by which I can only mean my students -- are unreliable witnesses. Some of them like me simply and solely because they like my taste in music, or the fact that I play video games. Several of them dislike me because I don't let them sit next to their friends in class.

That is why unions have negotiated over the years for tenure, and for automatic raises. Because the safest, most reasonable assumption is that the longer teachers teach, the better they get at teaching. It is generally safe to assume that teachers, being educated and dedicated, and under constant pressure from students and their families, and our coworkers and supervisors, to improve the service we offer, will do what they can to get better at their jobs, and will therefore get better with each passing year. So long as you have a very serious, carefully considered process of weeding out the bad ones in the beginning, and you have a process of continued review and guidance to make sure the teachers stay on target, and you have the means to remove people who slip through the cracks or who crack up and fall apart over the years --all of which we have -- you don't need to have definite objective criteria by which you can judge a teacher's value. Which is good, because those criteria do not exist.

I've gone on too long here; this is a large and complicated issue. But all I really want to say is one simple thing: I am not your enemy. I am no one's enemy. My union is not looking to get me benefits that I do not deserve, and they cannot get me anything that is unreasonable for me to have, because every teacher's contract gets renegotiated, over and over and over again. I know there are abuses, and failures; I know there are teachers who shouldn't be teaching yet remain in a classroom for many years, and I know that many people simply feel distaste for anyone who has the kind of job security and compensation that teachers have in this economy. What people need to realize is that the problems our society faces are not due to teachers, and they are certainly not due to public employees' unions; if when you think of teachers' unions you think of Jimmy Hoffa, don't. The negotiator for my union for this year is --



Me. I'm the one who will try to get teachers what they deserve, and to win for them the protections they need in order to keep doing their jobs well. Believe me, there is not a clause in our contract that ensures we will keep our jobs despite incompetence, and we will not be asking for a clause like that.

When my negotiating team and I meet -- and be aware, all of us on this team are teachers, and so we meet after a full day's work teaching children -- and discuss what we want to try to add or remove from the contract, we do not simply say, "Well, it would be great to have doughnuts every morning. Let's put in a clause that requires the district supply us with doughnuts every morning, or else we strike!" (Though come to think of it, doughnuts every morning would be nice . . .) We consider what the school board, and the public, would want, what they are willing to give us. We consider the economy, we consider the fact that our district is in a county particularly hard hit by the recession. That's why our union gave ground last year, and that's why this year we are working with the school district to try to cover the deficit caused by the loss of federal and state funding, rather than simply demanding more money, or we strike. We are not trying to gouge anyone, not trying to get more for the sake of having more.

We are simply trying to protect ourselves and our co-workers. Because even though I am a representative of the teacher's union, I'm also a member. And just like every member of my union, I serve the public, as well as I can -- better than I should, sometimes (Just ask my wife.). All I want is the ability to keep serving, the chance to help my students and my community, without having to hurt myself.

Please don't make me your enemy.